Library
by constantlearner
Summary: Set in the 1950s, Nancy Walker visits a public library and ends up saying what she thinks of someone. Reference to bad language, but no actual swearing.


It wasn't that Nancy preferred London. She didn't really. If anyone had pushed her to decide, she would have to admit that Wild Cat Island was probably still her favourite place in the world. But London offered anonymity. London offered a change from being Molly Blackett's daughter and Jane, Julia and Robert's mother. London offered a change from being Mrs John Walker and wearing her officer's-wives-tea-party smile. She wasn't Mrs Brading's sister, serious tester of Girl Guide badges here either.

London also offered better public libraries, and an aunt prepared to be generous with her library tickets. When you need to get up a subject in which you've never before had much interest quickly, that can be useful. Between the public library and the university, Leeds could probably have offered the same, but Titty and Dick would try to discuss the books, try to help her find what she needed to know and, inescapably, want to know why she was studying such an un-Amazon like topic. Anyway, London was a jolly sight to far from Portsmouth, where John would be for three days from tomorrow, and no one was likely to comment on her choice of books in a branch library in Camden.

Of course, just because something is unlikely doesn't mean it won't happen.

"What are you borrowing that for? Those aren't for you." About her own age. Carefully tended beard suggested he might think he looked attractively Mephistophelian. Scottish accent, but definitely not from the Glasgow area or the West Coast. She would recognise those well enough. She'd spent enough time there after all.

"You place is over there." He gestured toward a shelf filled entirely with the colourful and rather thin spines of a publishing house which seemed to specialise entirely novelettes. Nancy knew they had turned Dorothea down for writing stories that were too long. Nancy would have liked to reply; ignoring the stupid, smug git would be more inconspicuous so held her tongue. She wasn't going to leave her place in the queue to have the books she had chosen issued and let him win.

"That's where the romance books are. That's all you women can read or write. I wouldn't give them shelf space." The smug git continued his hectoring, making no attempt to keep his voice down. He was taller than she was, and took half a step closer to her. She did not step back. The thin woman before him in the queue threw a nervous glance. The woman behind the counter was issuing the books as fast as she could, but made no attempt at a "silence in the library". So, a regular bully then, Nancy thought. The librarian was doubtless constrained by rules in what she said. Nancy was not. Silence would be letting him win too.

It was no time for barbequing billygoats. It was entirely possible that the librarian learnt a few new words as Nancy described the limited intellectual capacities, lack of personal courage and other personal inadequacies of the bullying git. The thin lady scuttled off as soon as her books were issued, not even waiting to put them in her string bag. The man flung his tickets and the couple of Westerns on the library counter and stormed off.

"Mad bitch!"

Nancy responded with her favourite Maltese hand gesture.

"You've been to Italy?" the librarian asked, conversationally as she started to issue Nancy's books.

"Malta for a year or so."

"Thought I recognised the gesture." The librarian said.

 _A/N_ _When I was just old enough to be allowed to have a ticket for the adult section, the library I went to shelved the science fiction, the Westerns, romances by a certain publishing house and paperback whodunnits in four sections separately from the rest of the fiction. I was more than a little surprised when a total strange man told me off for choosing from the SF section. It was the first, but not the last time that sort of thing has occurred to me. I no long feel any inclination to excuse or forgive that sort of attitude on the grounds of the speaker "not knowing any better"._

 _I often wish I was Nancy Blackett._


End file.
